How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DNA image? She didn’t · Tim Appenzeller
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“The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race.” So wrote James Watson in The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, his controversial account of how he and Francis Crick deciphered the structure of DNA in 1953. The image, now known as photograph 51, showed an elegant, symmetrical pattern of spots formed by x-rays diffracted from strands of DNA—the fingerprint of the molecule’s helical structure. Rosalind Franklin, an x-ray crystallographer at King’s College London (KCL), had produced the image in the spring of 1952. But Watson’s 1968 book, amid other slights and sexist language directed at Franklin, implied the flash of insight was his alone. …
摘自《科学》(Science)2026年10月8日,Tim Appenzeller。仅引用开头一小段供了解文章,版权归原刊所有,全文请阅读原刊。